We have worked out a list of four critical thinking skills to be taught and assessed in EFL classrooms and in the next part of this paper we will outline and provide examples of tasks aimed at analysis, synthesis, inferencing and evaluating skills.

4.3 Tasks for teaching and assessing analysis skills

Analysis is the skill responsible for the accurate interpretation of arguments, texts and evidence. To analyse something like an argument or a passage of text, we need to identify its main parts and to see how they correlate, especially how the arguments relate to the conclusion. The generally accepted structure of a reasoning text is the following. First we introduce [1] the topic statement, or claim - there is an opinion or a position to support; further we provide [2] arguments for this position and thus prove that it is true; finally, we make [3] a conclusion restating that we have proved the claim to be true.

The tasks for assessing and forming students analytical skills in EFL classrooms should be connected with their ability to distinguish different parts of what they read and to understand how these parts relate to each other. In a language, conjunctions, linking words and other cohesive devices are responsible for organizing different parts of the text. We suggest the tasks based on working with cohesive devices in order to address students' analytical skills.

Task 1. Read the text. The ideas there are connected with the help of underlined conjunctions and linking words. Decide what role each of them plays. If it connects ideas that support the same point, put CONNECT above it. If it is used to introduce the opposite ideas or contrasting arguments, put CONTRAST above it. If it is used to show why something happens, put CAUSE above it. If it explains what happens because of something else, put CONSEQUENCE above it.

This task should be accompanied by a passage of text with underlined words like and, but, because, so, therefore, in addition, however, though, moreover, that's why and others, depending on the level of students' language skills. It checks the students' ability to identify functions of cohesive devices within the context and to distinguish similar ideas from contrasting ones and differentiate cause and consequence. To simplify the task, a teacher may first ask the students to say if the underlined words connect ideas or show cause-and-effect relations and then ask them to identify the four different functions. To make the task more complicated, the teacher may ask the students to first find and underline conjunctions and linkers and only then to identify their functions.

Task 2. In texts 1-5 find the following:

[1] the position the author is trying to prove;

[2] the arguments used to prove this position;

[3] the conclusion the author makes.

In some texts, you will not be able to find all the three components. Why do you think it is so? Is the conclusion always at the end of the text?

This task should be accompanied by a set of 5 short reasoning texts (up to 100 words each). Some of them will be structured [1] - [2] - [3] and others will have the [3] - [1] structure. The students need to explain that often the claim and the conclusion repeat each other, so there is no need to put both [1] and [3] in the text. That is why, the conclusion may be presented first and then supported by arguments. To facilitate this task, a teacher may state that there are two possible structures of texts and ask students to choose between the two. To make the task more complicated for advanced learners, a teacher may ask them to identify how many arguments there are and if they convince them in the truthfulness of the author's position.

Task 3. This is a student opinion essay. Read it quickly and say what position the student supports. Then read the essay again and answer the following questions:

1. Has the student supported her position with arguments?

2. Does the student provide arguments for the opposite position as well?

3. How many arguments support the student's position? Underline and label them with numbers.

4. How many support the opposite? Underline and label them as well.

5. How are the arguments organized within a text?

6. Which position looks more convincing to you?

This task should be accompanied with a text which represents a genre of writing the students do in class as well and are quite familiar with. There may be variations of this task: it can be a model answer where a student shows a balanced view of the problem but still convinces the reader, or it can be a set of randomly put arguments, some of which are strong and some weak; there can also be different approaches to structuring arguments within the text, and this task can be used as a way to introduce a new way of organizing ideas to students. In addition, this task may possibly be accompanied by more that one text and altered for the students to compare these two pieces of writing. This task can also be integrated with writing and used both before the students write their own text of a similar type and after they write it, as a way of peer-check.

4.4 Tasks for teaching and assessing synthesis skills

The skill of synthesis requires the ability to bring together information from various sources. To use synthesis a student needs to read all the sources, select the information from them and, according to the task, put it together in the required form. Synthesis is more complicated than analysis because it is more extensive and comprises more steps, so it is usually taught at higher levels of critical thinking skills. It can be expected that secondary school students are ready to be taught synthesis, as they are already familiar with project work and essay writing in L1, for which they need to be able to deal with literature. The following tasks address synthesis from different perspectives, as it is an umbrella skill which includes numerous other skills.

The first task is based on the process approach to writing and consists of several different steps, which can all vary depending on the necessary level of scaffolding for students. The more frequently it is done, the easier it will become for students and the less scaffolding will be needed. Here the presented version is for students who have been introduced to critical thinking on a basic level. To adapt it to the level of students who do not have experience of tasks integrating thinking skills and language skills, a teacher can provide options to choose from in task 1.2 and give templates in task 1.4. To make the task more difficult, the students may need to find additional materials to use in their writing or use only the materials they have found by themselves. The texts for reading and listening can be found in Appendixes 1 and 2.

Task 1.1. You will now have 7 minutes to read a text about Isaac Asimov. Then you will listen to part of a lecture about the same person. For statements 1-5, put A for ideas which were mentioned both in the text you have read and in the lecture, B for ideas mentioned only in the lecture and C for ideas that were not mentioned at all.

1. Robotics deals with smart machines and technologies that produce them.

2. Isaac Asimov was the first person to use the term robotics though he did not know that.

3. Robotics was the field of scientific interests of Asimov and the subject of his PhD.

4. Robots are made to serve humans and cannot become their enemies.

5. Isaac Asimov's ideas from science fiction were important for science, too.

Task 1.2. In your school newspaper you saw an announcement looking for articles about famous people. You were inspired by Isaac Asimov's story and want to write about it. Here is the announcement you saw:

We are looking for articles about extraordinary famous people! Do you know somebody's story that inspires you? Write an article of 200-250 words about this person and email it to schoolnewspaper@school.com

In the article and the lecture about Isaac Asimov, find the information that can be used to make the article interesting to the reader. The information is mainly factual, so you will need to decide how to put these facts into arguments showing that Asimov is an inspiring person. Note down three facts that you want to mention.

Task 1.3. Is there anything in common between the facts you have chosen? What idea can you use to unite them and produce the impression you want. It can be the idea of lifelong learning, multidisciplinary education, multinational background or any other idea that comes to your mind.

Task 1.4. Plan your article. It should have at least three paragraphs. The three facts you have chosen should represent your main arguments about how inspiring you find Asimov's story. Think about the order of these arguments and the ways to connect them.

This task can be used to assess complex synthesis skills because the students here will need not only to put smaller pieces of information into a text but also to choose these pieces on their own and assess the extent to which they can be used to create a consistent and convincing piece of writing. The meaning of the resulting text depends on the perspective the student chooses, as various meanings can be built up from three facts taken from two biographical texts about the same person. It can be expected that the students will focus on several different aspects of Asimov's life but it may also happen that there will be no similar works in the class.

Task 2. This is the text you are going to use as a source for your arguments in a talk. The text provides only factual information. Choose five facts that can be used to support or oppose your position. Which can be used for both supporting and opposing, if looked at from different perspectives?

This task should be accompanied by a text with no ready-made arguments, e.g. a historical or other document. It should correspond with the topic of the talk the student is supposed to give but should provide as little bias as possible as to which point of view the student should support. The students need to see with the help of this task that almost any factual information can be selected as the basis for an argument and used both to support and oppose a viewpoint, but with a different degree of straightforwardness.

Task 3. Read these documents (a historical document, a magazine article, an abstract of a research paper) and prepare a speech supporting your point of view. Use the following plan: 1) choose facts from the documents to be applied for arguments; 2) make conclusions from them so that it is clear what each fact drives at; 3) construct the logic of your speech, leaving out any extra arguments.

This task can be used as a preparatory step for debates or other persuasive speaking genres as well as separately. The stage of planning and constructing a monologue requires a high level of synthesis skills, as the students need to be able to make judgments about which information is relevant to their talk and also to decide about how well it stands together in the form of a logically structured argumentative monologue. If students work with tasks like this regularly, they will develop a more critical attitude to anything they read. The degree of difficulty of this task may be varied by the degree of credibility of texts and by the proportion of relevant and irrelevant information in them. There may be an increased amount of confusing, distracting or questionable information.

4.5 Tasks for teaching and assessing inferencing skills

The skill of inferencing can be referred to as part of synthesis skill. Inferencing means drawing conclusions from the information, based on the aim of communication or on the personal background of the reader. People may be inclined to make inferences by the ways of organizing information in the text. Sometimes inferences are already made explicitly by the author but the media, for instance, use a less direct way and encourage some inferences rather than others. Inferences can be made on different grounds, that is why some of them are safe and others are unsafe. When making unsafe inferences, people jump to conclusions.

Task 1. Read the following text about the fire in Notre-Dame de Paris. From the information in the text, which of conclusions A-D can be safely concluded?

A. The cathedral was set on fire by the people working on its reconstruction.

B. The government of France is desperate about the cultural monument that cannot be reconstructed.

C. The damage must have been dramatic but all the possible was done to save the cathedral.

D. We have lost Notre-Dame in a terrible fire.

From this list, only C is a safe inference. First of all, it can be considered safe because of the tentative language markers used: “must have been” and “all the possible”. An inexperienced reader may not notice the difference, but the fact is that unsafe inferences can be made from C, e.g. The fire fighters tried hard but were not qualified enough to save the cathedral. However, this inference is not implied in C and can result from the reader's experience, such as other texts on the topic of the fire in the Notre-Dame.

Task 2. Which reliable (safe) inferences can you make, based on the text? How can the same information be twisted into unreliable (unsafe) inferences?

This task can be used as a more complicated version of task 1. It is far more difficult for students as there are no options to choose from. For the first application of this task, a teacher can choose to provide a criterion-referenced assessment form or to suggest that the students participate in creating assessment criteria, if they are already familiar with what inferencing is from their L1 experience. In addition, this task can be followed by a peer-assessment session during which the students will need to assess inferences according to the created criteria. The inferences made by students can serve as a good survey of the students' background knowledge and discourse competence, which will be especially useful for working with new groups.

4.6 Tasks for teaching and assessing evaluation skills

Evaluation is a skill of making estimations on the basis of preexisting knowledge, mentality and experience. To be able to evaluate arguments, students need to understand that they can have various strong and weak points, and evaluating an argument as a strong one is different from agreeing with it and being convinced with what it says. In addition, the students need to distinguish between stated reasons and implicit assumptions, so as to be aware of what is said directly and what is the product of their cognitive activity.

Task 1. These extracts A-D in the news are on the same topic but put it from different perspective. Which one uses the strongest arguments? Which jumps at conclusions? Which has a reasoning error?

Working with this task, a teacher may choose different content for it. These can be authentic recent news articles featuring the topics which are close to students' hearts, which means that the students will have to distance from the topic and try to evaluate the articles in an unbiased way. If the students are not ready for it yet, they can be provided with authentic articles on topics they are not much familiar with but have sufficient outlook to speak about them on the basis of these articles. This will be easier from the discursive perspective, as the students' ideas will not be influenced by their own background. But may be difficult from the cognitive perspective, as some students may find it difficult to read on and discuss the topics they do not know much about. Another facilitating solution for this task is to adapt authentic texts making some arguments easier or more difficult to evaluate.

Task 2. Read these two texts. The author of which text is trying to impress you emotionally and which appeals to your reason?

To work with this task, the students need to be aware of the fact that there are no good and bad arguments but some of them are more successful than others because of how well the persuasive device is chosen. The emotional way of argumentation is little related to critical thinking, that is why a successful critical thinker is not supposed to believe emotional appeals without assessing them with reason. That is why this task can be useful in order to assess and train the students' ability to distinguish between rational and non-rational arguments. At higher levels of critical thinking skills, there may be more than two texts for this task or several ways of appealing to the reader within one text.

4.7 The potential for effectiveness of the suggested tasks

To sum up on the tasks for developing and assessing critical thinking skills suggested in these chapters, it is necessary to mention that the tasks mentioned above are targeted at analysis, synthesis, inferencing and evaluation skills separately and as precisely as we have found possible. These tasks can be accompanied by the texts and content that have been suggested in the paper as well as by other topics, depending on the requirements of the syllabus used in particular classrooms.

However, we tend to be supportive of the opinion that these tasks can be as successful as the ones integrating several critical thinking skills. There can as well be found a certain degree of potential for effectiveness for developing critical thinking skills in the tasks primarily aimed at language skills.

All these four skills, for instance, will be present in debates, media analysis, problem-solving tasks or other activities where a person needs to select information and sources, to distinguish the main components of a text and an argument and to constitute their own, unique argumentation from them, then producing written or oral speech with the purpose of expressing an opinion in a convincing way.

These tasks can be assumed to successfully assess and enhance students' critical thinking skills in EFL classrooms, as they are designed with the attention to the specificity of each of the four generalized thinking skills outlined in the paper: analysis, synthesis, inferencing and evaluation.

Conclusion

Critical thinking is among study skills that during the last three decades have been considered important in secondary school education and higher education and, particularly, in language education. EFL teaching provides a large variety of solutions concerning teaching techniques, types of activities and content. In addition, EFL as a school subject is oriented towards the real-life purposes of learners. For secondary school students, academic purposes usually have the major influence in their learning trajectory, as their main field of activity is connected with their school studies and further university studies.

Critical thinking is a two-way competence, which consists of skills used for receiving and processing information and of ones used for producing speech or acts. We consider reading a basic skill for teaching critical thinking skills in language education as receptive skills always form a basis for further production. Having analysed critical thinking skills discussed in the current literature, we have outlined four generalized skills to be taught and assessed in EFL classrooms: analysis, synthesis, inferencing and evaluation.

In this paper, we describe and summarise the content of SLA syllabuses that include critical thinking skills. It is possible to assume that the tasks aimed at teaching critical analysis, synthesis, inferencing and evaluation skills are insufficient in reading sections of secondary school coursebooks and would benefit from additional contribution.

Due to the importance of critical thinking as a competence taught in the classroom in order to be used outside of it at the secondary school stage of education and further at university, the theoretical knowledge serves as an important basis for classroom practice. Thus, we also study the practical application of the designed tasks in classroom teaching and provide ways of grading tasks for language levels from B1 to C1 and for various levels of critical thinking.

This paper summarises current theoretical studies on critical thinking in language education and practical studies of the subject of teaching and assessing critical thinking in EFL classrooms and specifically the issues of teaching reading as an L2 skill together with analysis, synthesis, inferencing and evaluation to secondary school students. It contributes to the discussion of practical application of federal educational standards in Russia and CEFR Companion Volume with New Descriptors in TEFL worldwide in relation to teaching critical thinking skills in integration with language skills. Further the paper discusses techniques for developing critical thinking skills and provides sets of tasks to be used by EFL teachers in their classroom practice in order to enhance their students' following critical thinking skills: analysis, synthesis, inferencing and evaluation.

The limitation of this study lies in the influence of factors other than task types of the effectiveness of teaching critical thinking skills, which are presumably the content of texts and the formulation of tasks.

The academic value of this paper is two-fold. First, summarizing theoretical literature on the subject is aimed at practical application of teaching critical thinking. An overview of critical thinking skills and a synthesis of their components is done with the consequent analysis of two EFL coursebooks for B2 language level and the age of secondary school students. Secondly, this paper suggests practical ways of teaching analysis, synthesis, inferencing and evaluation skills in EFL classrooms with advice on how to grade these tasks for language levels from B1 to C1 and different levels of critical thinking. Another benefit of these tasks is that they are recyclable, which means that they can be used more than once if accompanied with different texts and used with different degrees of scaffolding.

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Appendix 1

Too much luck to be sheer luck: Isaac Asimov, his roots and success

It has almost become common knowledge that the international word robot has Slavic origins. Do you know, however, that the word robotics is a term which was coined by a science fiction author with Russian origins? So it was. Isaac Asimov, a Russian-born Jewish American scientist wrote a story where he unintentionally created a word. This looks a bit unclear, as well as many other things in Asimov's life.

To begin with, we do not know the date of his birth. It is either the end of 1919 or the beginning of 1920, which had not been important until he had to go to the army in autumn 1945. According to his papers, he was already 26 that autumn, though Asimov always celebrated his birthday on January, 2.

Another doubt lies in the spelling of the surname. When Isaac and his parents left the USSR, they needed to write their family name in Latin alphabet, and made a mistake in it. It would be easy to recognize someone from Russia in the surname Azimov, especially for Russian speakers, but one small misspelled letter made a very big change, and even inspired Isaac Asimov to create a story “Spell My Name with and S”. His name looked so extraordinary that it made many people believe it was a pseudonym created for his writing career.

This part of his career made Asimov famous, but he had another one. In fact, he studied chemistry at Columbia University, then got a PhD in chemistry and later taught it to university students in Boston. Contrary to the stereotypes about scientists, Asimov was an able speaker and started writing short stories at the age of 11.

His love of science and writing created a unique mixture and were very much on time in history. During the period when Asimov's native country was starting to discover space, people's desire to read science fiction grew fast. After World War II, people needed to dream big and wanted to enjoy stories about robots and space. That's why Isaac Asimov became popular during his life, unlike many other talented authors.

This looks like a lot of luck, doesn't it?

Appendix 2

Recording script

In this part of the lecture we will discuss the definition of robotics, the history of this term and the contribution of science fiction to science. Robotics is a discipline that studies machines that can replace human beings at doing different tasks and technologies used to create them. The term robotics was first used by Isaac Asimov in a science fiction short story Liar! The author, however, said that he thought the term already existed and he was not inventing it. Also, as early as 1942, Asimov suggested three laws of robotics. They are the following: the first law says that a robot must never harm a human or put a human in danger. According to the second law, a robot should always do what a human tells it to do. The third law tells a robot to always protect itself, but only if it does not harm a human. This means that robots are slaves of people and the rise of machines is technically impossible. These laws were used by many other authors and even played a role in the ethic principles of artificial intelligence.

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